Cambridge, UK: 15 June 2016
Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the Arm® architecture, announced today that Thundersoft has joined the 96Boards initiative as a Steering Committee member and Manufacturing Partner. This new collaboration allows Thundersoft to both influence the development of the 96Boards specifications and initiative, and produce 96Boards products with support provided on the 96Boards forum.
96Boards is Linaro’s initiative to build a single software and hardware community across low-cost development boards based on Arm technology. Thundersoft is a leading Smart Device Platform Technology Provider specialized in the mobile OS segment. Thundersoft will be able to leverage 96Boards to provide its services to a broader market with more rapidly developed and easily maintained solutions benefiting from the platform standardization provided by the initiative.
“Historically, there has been no affordable way for developers to work on the latest Armv8 64-bit hardware,” said Larry Geng, CEO of Thundersoft. “The 96Boards initiative has helped to provide the Arm ecosystem with a standardized, silicon-independent platform that is opening up new markets by delivering the latest Arm technology at a reasonable cost to a much wider audience. We expect that by helping develop the 96Boards initiative, we will encourage a broader range of engineering talent to develop on Arm, which will in turn lead to accelerated innovation and faster time to market for new products that will benefit from Thundersoft services.”
The 96Boards steering committee now includes ten companies who are working together on Consumer, Enterprise, Digital Home, Networking and IoT specifications. To date, the Consumer and Enterprise Edition specifications have been released with Consumer edition boards readily available and the first Enterprise edition board currently in production and expected to ship in the next month. In total, there are now over twenty main boards being sold or under development with a large number of mezzanine products and other accessories being released.
“Thundersoft joining as a Steering Committee member and Manufacturer Partner is a big step forward in the maturing of the 96Boards initiative,” said Yang Zhang, Director of 96Boards. “Thundersoft is well positioned to provide a software service to our existing members engaged in 96Boards and their customers who are developing next generation solutions based on the 96Boards specifications. We look forward to the initiative fostering increased cooperation opportunities for Thundersoft in both hardware and software development.”
About Linaro
Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.
To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit and http://www.96Boards.org
About Thundersoft
Thundersoft, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZ: 300496), is the world’s leading provider of mobile operating system and smart device solutions. Focusing in areas like mobile phone/tablet, IoT, automotive and enterprise, etc., with full-stack engineering resource covering mobile software, hardware and all layers of operating system, rich technology/solution portfolio, strategic partnership with key SoC/ISV/IHV vendors, and global support networks, Thundersoft is able to provide professional, solid, responsive and turn-key mobile platform technology, services and solutions, and enable customers worldwide to build high-quality and quick-to-market products. Learn more at www.thundersoft.com